Introduction

On 1 July 1839, Sultan Mahmud II died and the throne passed to his eldest son, Abdülmecid. A few months later, on 3 November 1839, the new sultan signed the so-called Gülhane Rescript, ushering in the reforms known as the Tanzimat. The purpose of the next two chapters is to trace and analyse some intended and unintended modernising effects of the discourse of reform, in tandem with the older policy of modern ruler visibility, on the public (especially non-Muslim) mind, observable from the peculiar vantage point of royal public ceremony. These effects include the process of naming (oneself and ‘the other’), motifs of sacred and secular time and space, evolving notions of a social pact and social (organic and familial) metaphors, innovative concepts of necessity and duty, as well as the importance of group unity and loyalty. In their total-ity, these effects contain the essence of a novel, modernising project, especially in the sense of connecting and familiarising the people (ruled) with the centre (ruler), and establishing a legitimate sphere for mutually beneficial symbolic interaction between the two, both on the individual and the group level. Over time, as the following chapters demonstrate, under the guise of commemorating the ruler, the celebrations provided a fertile ground for the expression of communal interests and the advancement of inter-communal rivalries leading to gradual group mobilisation and resultant hardening of previously porous group boundaries. In the end, all of these effects inscribed the fields of modern public space/sphere and modern politics in the Ottoman Empire, which the celebrations had help forge. Ironically, they were then entirely appropriated for a newly realised ethnonational mental universe, which rather than unite, did indeed splinter, first the imperial public, and then, with a certain, irreducible measure of historical contingency, the Empire itself.

The reigns of Abdülmecid (1839–61) and Abdülaziz (1861–76) constitute the most formative period for the above-mentioned transformations. Following in the footsteps of their father, Mahmud II, both of these rulers enjoyed high levels of visibility and accessibility vis-à-vis their subjects from the 1840s to the 1860s, a time when autocracy still had no viable domestic alternative.